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JustAnEngineer
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ARM HPC incoming

Wed Nov 13, 2019 12:38 pm

https://www.techpowerup.com/261100/cray ... ascale-era

Under the alliance agreement, Cray is developing the first-ever commercial supercomputer powered by the Fujitsu A64FX Arm -based processor with high-memory bandwidth (HBM) and supported on the proven Cray CS500 supercomputer architecture and programming environment. Initial customers include Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Stony Brook University, and University of Bristol.
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Waco
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Wed Nov 13, 2019 12:49 pm

:)
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Captain Ned
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Wed Nov 13, 2019 12:59 pm

You always get the best toys.
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
dragontamer5788
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Wed Nov 13, 2019 1:01 pm

The Fujitsu ARM has that new SVE vector instruction set. Definitely exciting to see it come around.
 
Waco
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Wed Nov 13, 2019 1:04 pm

The naming takes me back to the Athlon 64 FX chips. I feel old now.
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JustAnEngineer
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Thu Mar 05, 2020 8:55 am

How about a 2x reticle size interposer using 5nm EUV lithography?
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15582/ts ... n-reticles
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Waco
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Thu Mar 05, 2020 5:58 pm

I can only imagine the defect rate trying to fab something that large.
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JustAnEngineer
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Thu Mar 05, 2020 6:58 pm

You'd expect that the interposer would be simpler to fabricate than a ginormous logic chip. Is there room for redundant traces? Back in the first quarter of 2009, when the 40 nm process was brand-new, AMD tried it out with the mid-range (137mm²) RV740 and learned that vias were much trickier than expected. When they brought out a full line of 40 nm GPUs five to nine months later (including chips with 2½ times as many transistors), they included redundant vias in the design of the new chips to get much better yields than their competitor was managing on the new process.
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JustAnEngineer
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Thu Mar 05, 2020 7:10 pm

Here's a more modest approach that could have much wider application:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15575/am ... e-and-xeon
Out of those announcing an ARM N1-based SoC, Ampere is leading the pack with a new 80-core design aimed at cloud providers and hyperscalers. The new Altra family of products is aiming to offer competitive performance, performance per watt, and scalability up to 210 W and tons of IO, for any enterprise positioning.

Altra is built on TSMC’s 7nm, and while is technically an Arm v8.2 design, it does borrow a couple of features from 8.3 and 8.5, namely hardware based mitigations for side channel attacks and a couple of other small micro-architectural features. Each of the 80 single-threaded cores is designed to run at 3.0 GHz all-core, and Ampere was consistent in its messaging in that the top SKU is designed to run at 3.0 GHz at all times, even when both 128-bit SIMD units per core are being used (thus an unlimited turbo at 3.0 GHz). The CPU range will vary from 45W to 210W, and vary in core count.

Ampere will be launching with two reference designs for Altra, one in single socket called Mt. Snow, and one in dual socket called Mt. Jade. Each design will be available in 1U and 2U form factors, with PCIe 4.0 and CCIX attach, and up to 16 memory modules per socket.
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blastdoor
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Tue Mar 10, 2020 11:05 am

This one is pretty interesting:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15578/a- ... mpressions

Strong performance for a chip based on an ARM reference design and seemingly short on cache.

This just makes me wish even more that Apple would unleash their design team to build a workstation/server class CPU.
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Waco
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Tue Mar 10, 2020 3:03 pm

Drop the AMD figures by 30% on average (for a move to Zen 2 / Rome) and the ARM prospect (at least, that particular chip) is a lot less inviting.
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blastdoor
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Wed Mar 11, 2020 10:06 am

Waco wrote:
Drop the AMD figures by 30% on average (for a move to Zen 2 / Rome) and the ARM prospect (at least, that particular chip) is a lot less inviting.


certainly true. And this particular ARM chip has a process advantage over these particular x86 chips.

But to me, the noteworthy thing here is that a pretty generic implementation of an ARM reference design does as well as it does. And to the extent that it deviates from the reference ARM design, it does so by reducing cache (???)

I think this suggests that a company that invests more than the minimal effort could really give x86 some stiff competition in the server space, especially when you factor in cost. For Amazon this might be a no-brainer -- why should they keep funding Intel's 60% margins? And as soon as people get used to running Windows and Linux on Amzon's processors in the cloud, why not buy servers from Amazon? Or desktops?

The disruption coming for Intel is so much bigger than just AMD. Intel totally deserves it, but I do feel bad for national security reasons.
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Waco
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Re: ARM HPC incoming

Wed Mar 11, 2020 10:52 am

Yes - for particular workloads, they're quite competitive even today (and more so in the HPC space that I work in). If you venture outside of those workloads, though, it's surprising sometimes just how variable the performance can be.
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